The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  In other cases, however, complete texts of previously lost Gospels have been uncovered. And in the opinion of probably the majority of scholars of early Christianity, these are the most significant manuscript discoveries of modern times. In particular, it is the discovery of a library of texts in Upper Egypt, near the village of Nag Hammadi, that has generated the greatest scholarly interest and media attention. This was a discovery of inestimable value, as significant for early Christian studies as the Dead Sea Scrolls were for early Jewish studies. Had the Dead Sea Scrolls not been found, scholars would consider the Nag Hammadi library the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times. And among the books of the Nag Hammadi library, none has provoked such attention and created such intellectual fervor and excitement as the Gospel of Thomas, the single most important noncanonical book yet to be uncovered, a collection of the sayings of Jesus, some of which may be authentic, many of which were previously unknown.

  The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

  It is an intriguing story, this chance discovery of a cache of ancient Christian documents in 1945, in a remote part of Upper Egypt, a story of serendipity, ineptitude, secrecy, ignorance, scholarly brilliance, murder, and blood revenge. Even now, after scholars have spent years trying to piece it all together, details of the find remain sketchy.

  We do know that it occurred in December 1945—about a year and a half before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls hundreds of miles away in the Judean desert—when seven bedouin fieldhands were digging for sabakh, a nitrate-rich fertilizer, near a cliff called Jabal al-Tarif along the Nile in Upper Egypt. The fertilizer was used for the crops they grew near their small hamlet of al-Qasr, across the river from the largest village of the area, Nag Hammadi, some three hundred miles south of Cairo and forty miles north of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. The leader of the group, the one responsible for the find once it was made and the one who later divulged the details of the discovery, was named, memorably enough, Mohammed Ali. It was Ali's younger brother, however, who actually made the find, accidentally striking something hard below the dirt with his mattock. It turns out to have been a human skeleton. Digging around a bit, they uncovered, next to the skeleton, a large earthenware jar, about two feet high, with a bowl over the top, sealed with bitumen.

  Mohammed Ali and his companions were reluctant to open the jar, for fear that it might contain an evil genie. On further consideration, they realized it might also contain gold, and so without further ado they smashed into it with their mattocks. But there was no genie and no gold—just a bunch of old leather-bound books, of little use to this group of illiterate bedouin.

  Ali divided up the find, ripping the books apart so everyone would get a fair share. His companions evidently wanted no part of them, however, and so he wrapped the lot in his turban, returned home, and deposited them in the outbuilding where they kept the animals. That night, his mother evidently used some of the brittle leaves to start the fire for the evening meal.

  The story gets a bit complicated at this point, as real life intrudes, but in an almost unreal way. Mohammed Ali and his family had for a long time been involved in a blood feud with a tribe in a neighboring village. It had started some six months earlier, when Ali's father, while serving as a night watchman over some imported German irrigation machinery, had shot and killed an intruder. By the next day, Ali's father had been murdered by the intruder's family. About a month after they discovered the old books in the jar, Mohammed Ali and his brothers were told that their father's murderer was asleep by the side of the road, next to a jar of sugarcane molasses. They grabbed their mattocks, found the fellow still asleep, and hacked him to death. They then ripped open his chest, pulled out his still warm heart, and ate it—the extreme act of blood vengeance.

  As it turns out, the man they had murdered was the son of a local sheriff. By this time, Mohammed Ali had come to think that perhaps these old books he had found might be worth something. Moreover, he was afraid that since he and his brothers would be prime suspects in this cold-blooded murder, his house would be searched for clues. He gave one of the books over to the local Coptic priest for safekeeping until the storm blew over.

  This local priest had a brother-in-law who was an itinerant teacher of English and history, who stayed in his home once a week while making his rounds in the parochial schools in the area. The history teacher realized that the books might be significant enough to fetch a good price, and he went to Cairo to try to sell the volume in his possession. It was not an altogether successful attempt, as the book was confiscated by the authorities. Eventually, however, he was allowed to sell it to the Coptic Museum.

  The director of the museum had a good idea what the book was, and to make a long story short, in conjunction with a young visiting French scholar of antiquity, Jean Doresse, whom he had known in Paris—known fairly well, in fact, as the director had proposed marriage to Mrs. Doresse before she became Mrs. Doresse—managed to track down most of the remaining volumes and acquire them for the museum. Doresse had the first chance to look them over as a scholar. Eventually an international team was assembled by UNESCO to photograph, study, translate, and publish them. The international team was headed by an American scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, James Robinson. The work was finally accomplished, we now have editions of the collection available in quality English translations, and you can purchase them online or in almost any really decent used bookstore."

  What is this ancient collection of books? The short answer is that it is the most significant collection of lost Christian writings to turn up in modern times.It includes several Gospels about Jesus that had never before been seen by any western scholar, books known to have existed in antiquity but lost for nearly 1,500 years. The cache contained twelve leather-bound volumes, with pages of a thirteenth volume removed from its own, now lost, binding and tucked inside the cover of one of the others. The pages are made of papyrus. The books themselves are anthologies, collections of texts compiled and then bound together. Altogether there are fifty-two treatises preserved among these volumes. But six of the treatises are duplicates, making a total of forty-six documents in the collection. They include Gospels by such persons as Jesus' disciple Philip and secret revelations delivered to his disciple John and another to James; they include mystical speculations about the beginning of the divine realm and the creation of the world, metaphysical reflections on the meaning of existence and the glories of salvation; they include expositions of important religious doctrines and polemical attacks on other Christians for their wrongheaded and heretical views—especially Christians we would call proto-orthodox.

  The documents are written in ancient Coptic. But there are solid reasons for thinking that they were each originally composed in Greek. For some of the books there is no question about it: Among the texts, for example, is a small extract taken from Plato's Republic. For other works, including the Gospel of Thomas, we have Greek fragments that date from a much earlier period. For some works, linguists are able to determine that the Coptic is "translation" rather than "original composition" Coptic.

  The leather-bound books themselves were manufactured in the second half of the fourth century. We know this because the spines of the leather bindings were strengthened with scrap paper, and some of the scrap paper came from receipts that are dated 341, 346, and 348 ce. The books thus must have been manufactured sometime after 348 ce.

  The date of the books, of course, is not the same as the date of the documents found within the books—just as the Bible (another anthology) lying on my desk was manufactured in 1998, but the documents it contains were written some 1,900 years earlier. So, too, with the Nag Hammadi texts: They were originally written long before the end of the fourth century when these particular books were made. The Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas I just mentioned date from the second century, and as I've pointed out in an earlier chapter, this Gospel along with others in the collection was known to church fathers of the second and thi
rd centuries. When were the texts of these books written? Obviously they were produced at different times and places (Plato's Republic, e.g., in the fourth century bce); but most of them appear to have been in existence by the second Christian century at the latest. Scholars have engaged in hard fought debates over the dates of some of these books, especially over whether they were composed as early as the first century, before the books of the New Testament. Among these particular debates, those over the Gospel of Thomas are probably the most heated.

  We do not know exactly who wrote these books or why they came to be hidden under the cliff of Jabal al-Tarif, just above the bend of the Nile, north of Luxor. It is probably significant that a Christian monastery, founded by the famous Christian monk Saint Pachomius in the fourth century, is located just three miles away. Scholars have been inclined to think that these books may have come from the library of the monastery, a view supported by the contents of the scrap paper in their bindings. But why would monks have disposed of the books?

  As we will see more fully in a later chapter, a significant moment occurred in the history of the formation of the New Testament canon in the late fourth century. It was in the year 367 ce that the powerful bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius, wrote a letter to the churches throughout Egypt under his jurisdiction, in which he laid out in strict terms the contours of the canon of Scripture. This was the first time anyone of record had indicated that the twenty-seven books that we now have in our New Testament canon, and only those twenty-seven books, should be considered as Scripture. Moreover, Athanasius insisted that other "heretical" books not be read. Is it possible that monks of the Pachomian monastery near Nag Hammadi felt the pressure from on high and cleaned out their library to conform with the dictates of the powerful bishop of Alexandria? If so, why did they choose to hide the books instead of burn them? Is it possible that they, the ones who hid the books in an earthenware jar off in the wilderness, were actually fond of these books, and decided to hide them away for safekeeping until the tides of scriptural preference shifted, and they could be retrieved for their library of sacred texts? We will never know.

  We will be discussing others of these books in the so-called Nag Hammadi library later, when we come to examine one form of early Christian Gnosticism, arguably the most significant and certainly one of the most fascinating forms of Christianity that came to be "lost." For now, we will look at just one of the books, the one that has proved most intriguing and significant for historians of early Christianity, a forgery known by name from ancient times, which came to be lost, only now to be discovered. It is a forgery of the teachings of Jesus written in the name of one who should know them better than anyone: his twin brother, Didymus Judas Thomas.

  The Sayings of Thomas

  The Gospel of Thomas is a complete text: we have its beginning, its end, and everything in between. It consists of 114 sayings of Jesus, and apart from the introductory verse by the author, almost nothing else. There are no stories told about Jesus here: no birth, no baptism, no miracles, no travels, no trials, no death, no resurrection, no narrative of any kind. Most of the sayings are simply introduced by the words, "Jesus said. . ." followed by another verse that begins, "Jesus said. . . ." In some instances there is dialogue between Jesus and the disciples, in which they say or ask something and Jesus responds, or he says something and they respond. These are the closest thing to a narrative in the book. There is no obvious organizing pattern to the collection of sayings. A few of them are connected by topic or by "catchwords," but for the most part the sequence appears to be completely random.

  Over half of the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas are similar to sayings found in the New Testament Gospels (79 of the 114, by one count). In some instances, these similarities are quite close. Here, for example, you can find the well-known parable of the mustard seed

  The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like." He said to them, "It is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seeds. But when it falls on tilled soil, it produces a great plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky." (Saying 20, cf. Mark 4:30-31)

  And, in a somewhat more terse form than in the New Testament, the comment about the blind leading the blind:

  Jesus said, "If a blind man leads a blind man, they will both fall into a pit." (Saying 34; cf. Matt. 15:14)

  And one of the beatitudes:

  Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven." (Saying 54; cf. Luke 6:20)

  Many of these sayings are pithier and more succinct than their canonical counterparts. Is it possible that Thomas presents a more accurate version of the sayings than, say, Matthew, Mark, and Luke (there are fewer parallels to John)— that is, a closer approximation to the way Jesus actually said them?

  Other sayings begin in a familiar way, similar to something in the New Testament Gospels, but then shift into a different, somewhat odd sounding key. For example, Saying 2:

  Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all."

  The saying begins like Matt. 7:7-8, "Seek and you shall find." But what does it mean when it speaks of being troubled, becoming astonished, and ruling over "the all"? Or consider Saying 72:

  A man said to him, "Tell my brothers to divide my father's possessions with me." He said to him, "O man, who has made me a divider?" He turned to his disciples and said to them, "I am not a divider, am I?" (cf. Luke 12:13-14)

  Or take an example near the end, Saying 113:

  His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying, 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it."

  Again, the passage starts in a familiar way (cf. Mark 13:4 or esp. Luke 17:20-21), but ends somewhere else.

  Then there are a large number of sayings that sound even more remote from what one finds on the lips of Jesus in the canonical Gospels (except for in a few set phrases). Just to take three rather striking instances:

  Jesus said, "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?" (Saying 11)

  His disciples said, "When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?" Jesus said, "When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid." (Saying 37)

  Jesus said, "That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not have it within you." (Saying 70)

  What is one to make of these peculiar sayings? What do they mean? And where did they come from?

  First, on the matter of where they came from. Since so many of the sayings are similar to those of the New Testament Gospels, there have always been scholars who have claimed that "Thomas" (no one thinks this was really Thomas, the brother of Jesus, but for the sake of convenience, we will grant him his pseudonym) used the New Testament Gospels as a source, modifying their sayings and adding some of his own.

  To explain this position more fully, I need to digress for a moment. The closest parallels with the sayings of Thomas are those found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These three are commonly known as the Synoptic Gospels (literally meaning: "seen together"), since they have so many stories and sayings in common that they can be put in parallel columns and compared carefully with one another. Long before the Gospel of Thomas was discovered, scholars were intrigued by the question of why the Synoptics were so similar to one another, why they often tell exactly the same stories, in the sam
e sequence, sometimes word for word the same, and yet at other times they differ in stories told, sequence, and wording. The solution that was eventually devised for this "Synoptic Problem," a solution that is still held by the majority of researchers today, is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source for a number of their stories. But Matthew and Luke have a number of additional passages almost entirely made up of sayings that are not found in Mark. Mark could not therefore be the source for these passages. Where then did Matthew and Luke acquire them? The theory developed that Matthew and Luke took these passages, principally sayings, from another source that has since been lost. The German scholars who devised this theory decided to call this other source Quelle, the German word, conveniently enough, for "source." It is frequently called Q for short.

  Q then provided the material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. It is widely assumed that Q was an actual document, written in Greek, in circulation in the early church, a document that recorded at least two deeds of Jesus (the story of Jesus' temptations is in Q, as is an account of his healing the son of a centurion) and a number of his teachings, including the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, and other familiar sayings.